Statute of Limitations pc-13 Read online

  “I have a bag,” Abeyta said, but Estelle held up a hand.

  “Don’t move it until Linda takes the photos, Tony. And we don’t know for sure if this is the one. So measure about four times, okay? Mark it with a flag, then just leave it alone.”

  “You got it.”

  Estelle moved off to one side and opened her phone. In a moment, Linda answered, her voice sounding small and far away.

  “Hey,” Estelle said. “Are you okay?”

  “Oh, I guess so. I’m down in the darkroom.”

  “Ah.” Estelle knew that it was one thing, out in the open with others to provide support, to deal with death and destruction, especially if the victim was family. But it was worse to watch the grotesque images appear out of the chemical bath, ghostly apparitions that gazed up out of the developer tray in the hushed and musty tomb of the lonely downstairs darkroom.

  Linda Real usually handled such things with aplomb and good humor. The rules changed when violent death became personal, taking a step closer.

  “I wanted to finish up the black and whites,” she said. As standard procedure, she took triplicate photos, one set in black and white that she could develop herself, a set with another camera in color-film that would have to be sent out for processing, with both the attendant risks and delays-and finally finishing up with digital shots for instant reference.

  “We found Janet’s car, Linda. As soon as you can break loose…”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “We’re in the bank parking lot.”

  “Gotcha.” Linda sounded as if she might revive. “I could use a little air.”

  Estelle returned to the Jeep. “Do you want to call your brother, or do you want me to?” she asked the sergeant.

  Mears laughed. “I’ll get him. He’s just sitting in front of the television, anyway, fat and happy.”

  Estelle knew that at least half of that wasn’t the case. Both Tom and Terry Mears were angular, slim, and barely average height. “I want to know if Janet withdrew anything from her account…and how much. There should be a time on the ATM slip, shouldn’t there?”

  “I would think so. I don’t use ’em, so I can’t tell you for sure. Bro’s going to ask for a court order, you know.”

  “Ay, I was afraid of that. Well, tell him that we’ll need to look at the ATM transaction tape, and also at the video. In the meantime, I’ll go get the paperwork from Judge Hobart.”

  “Better you than me,” Mears said. “By the way, I’ll use the black light to make sure, but I don’t think we have any blood spatters in the vehicle itself.”

  “That’s surprising,” Estelle said.

  “Nah, not really. Not with a.22. Pops a nice hole, not much blow-back, not much in the way of bone chips on the outside. Plays hell on the inside, but not otherwise. But we’ll see.” He knelt down by the Liberty’s running board and looked up toward the driver’s window, then played his flashlight upward at the soft, finely textured fabric head liner.

  “We might get lucky and find some powder residue on the liner,” Mears added.

  “And if you’ll get your brother, I’ll see about the warrant.” She glanced at her watch, remembering her promise to former sheriff Bill Gastner. What was supposed to be fifteen minutes had mushroomed into an evening. “I was going to talk to Bill about what happened in the office earlier this afternoon, but I never made it. I’ll get him to go with me to Hobart’s. That’ll mellow the judge down some.”

  “Linda’s on the way?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. We need to impound this puppy, too. Get it over into the secure barn so nobody dinks with it,” Mears said, and shook his head. “We’re going to have a long, long list of folks wondering about whatever happened to their nice holiday.”

  “Remind them that Janet Tripp can’t wonder about anything anymore,” Estelle said. Far off to the north, she heard the moan of an aircraft, and her own spirits rose. As it approached fast and direct, she could tell that it was a twin jet-prop. “And that has to be the air ambulance,” she said. “I need to pick up Francis at the airport.”

  “Merry Christmas,” Mears said.

  “People keep telling me that. If I hear it long enough, I might start believing it.”

  Back at her car, she opened the door and removed the plastic crime-scene tape that Pasquale had strung up, repositioning it to Mears’s unit. Then she headed to the airport, six miles away at the foot of Cat Mesa. By the time she arrived there, the Piper Navajo had parked, its engines spooling down to idle. Estelle left her car at the chainlink gate and walked out across the tarmac toward the air ambulance. In a moment, Francis gingerly made his way down the little folding steps from the plane, turning to wave at whomever was inside. The moment he was around the wing and clear, the engines shrieked, the nose wheel cocked sharply to the left, and the Navajo surged back out to the taxiway.

  “Smooth as silk,” Francis said. “Flying at night is neat, querida.”

  “I’ll take your word for it, oso.” She snuggled into his arms and enjoyed her own airborne moment as her “bear” swung her around, her feet well clear of the ground.

  “How’s it going?” he whispered in her ear.

  She sighed. “Not good, oso. Not good. And it’s not going to improve much, either.”

  “What’s going on? I phoned Alan, and he said Eduardo was slipping. He also said you had a homicide of some sort. We had a bad connection, and I didn’t get the details.”

  “A homicide of some sort,” Estelle repeated. “We have the kind where someone’s been killed to death.” But she didn’t smile, and neither did Francis. He saw the look of misery in her eyes and lowered her until her feet touched the ground. “Someone I know?”

  “I don’t think so. Janet Tripp? She’s Mike Sisneros’s girlfriend.”

  “My God. This happened just this afternoon?”

  “Yep.” She took his hand as they walked back to the county car. “Remember Butch Romero?”

  “Sure.”

  “He found the body in Escudero Arroyo.”

  “Wow.”

  “One gunshot to the head. Just dumped in a tangle of old cars. Nothing else. It’s looking like she was attacked over at Posadas State Bank, and then dumped in the arroyo afterward.” Francis tried to settle his bulk in the passenger seat and yelped as he cracked his knee against the computer that grew out of the center console in front of the radios. “Let me fold that out of your way,” she said.

  He thumped his left elbow against the shotgun in the rack between them. “You need some more junk in this car,” he said. “It’s a miracle that it has enough power to move.”

  “We don’t get a lot of passengers up front,” she said. “A veces no está en situación de exigir nada.”

  “Your mother says that,” Francis said as Estelle backed the car away from the gate. “Her version of ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’”

  “She says lots of things. And after today, she’s going to be at her acid best,” Estelle said. “I haven’t been home since 4:05 this afternoon, and we haven’t even started yet.”

  “Any good leads?” Francis settled with one hand looped through the panic handle as the car accelerated hard on the highway toward Posadas.

  “It’s bizarre,” Estelle said. “And no…nothing that sends us in any particular direction. That’s the trouble.” She paused as she let the car drift toward the center line as they raced around the sweeping corner, and then pushed hard through the intersection with County Road 43. “Every minute that we dawdle, the killer puts more miles between him and us.”

  Francis leaned over the center console equipment, gazing at the speedometer. “Dawdle has a new definition in this household,” he said.

  “If I could figure out a way to be in three places at once, I’d try it,” Estelle said.

  “Alan’s doing the autopsy?”

  “As we speak. I just came from there a little bit ago.”

  Francis looked hard at her. “Is there anyt
hing that makes you suspect the deputy? The boyfriend?”

  “Por Dios, I hope not,” Estelle sighed. “But we can’t be sure. Not yet. Eddie went over to Lordsburg to get him.”

  “Bizarre,” Francis said.

  “Oh, sí.”

  “Sofía is okay with the two terrors?”

  “She’s in heaven…or so she says. We were all out for a nice afternoon walk when Butch found the body. And then he found us. That ended the nice walk.”

  They swung into the hospital parking lot where Francis’s vehicle had been left. “You going home now?” he asked.

  Estelle shook her head. “I can’t, querido. I need to talk with Padrino about this afternoon. He’s one of the last people to see Janet alive.” She glanced at her watch. “And I was supposed to do that hours ago.” She rested her forehead against his, the two of them bent over the junk between their seats.

  “Be hard as hell to make out in this car,” Francis said.

  “That’s what the back seat is for.” Estelle laughed.

  “I need to check on Eduardo,” he said, and tipped his head back until their lips met.

  “Do what you can for him.”

  “Oh, for sure,” he replied. “And I’ll check in with Alan and see what he needs.”

  “Maybe next week sometime, we can get together for a while and pretend that we have a life.”

  “It’s a deal.” He opened the door and pushed himself out. “Be careful, querida.”

  “Love you, oso.”

  As she accelerated out of the parking lot, she watched Francis in the rearview mirror, watched as he trudged toward the emergency room entrance. She stopped at the highway and looked again. From that distance, just before he pulled open the doors, his figure in the evening light looked just like Francisco, and she felt a pang of loss as he opened the door and disappeared inside.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Even though she knew that she still needed to call on Judge Lester Hobart to obtain a subpoena for the bank’s ATM records, and then return to the bank parking lot, Estelle still felt a soft flood of relaxation and relief as she turned onto Guadalupe Terrace. Former sheriff Bill Gastner’s large, fortress-like adobe nestled in the huge cottonwoods, a retreat where it would be just too easy to welcome a mug of tea and good conversation.

  The porch light was off, an old habit that Gastner had once explained away with a shrug. “A light scares away the nesting swallows. Besides, I know where the damn step is.” Christmas wasn’t the nesting season for the little birds, and with returning curls of clouds and a fraction of moon, it was dark enough that the single porch light would have been welcome.

  She pulled into his driveway and at the same time found her cell phone, thumbing the autodial. Gastner might well ignore the telephone, too. He did. His answering machine, a gadget he loathed but kept in deference to his job as a state livestock inspector, finally clicked, and Estelle switched off before the beep to record a message.

  The front door, a massive, carved affair from a mission deep in Mexico, was recessed in the small courtyard. Had Gastner possessed the faintest tinge of green in his thumbs, realtors would have described the entryway courtyard as “inviting and charming.” As it was, it more resembled a fortress, plain and utilitarian.

  Estelle pulled her small flashlight off her belt to navigate the short distance from her car through the gateless portal, across the courtyard to the front door, and stopped short. The small beam of light caught first a pair of boots, then corduroy trousers, and finally the large body lying half on and half off the single concrete step, head deep in a runty acacia that Gastner had allowed to grow to the right of the door as his “guard dog.”

  “Padrino!” she gasped, and darted forward. The acacia was a nasty little bush, and its stubby thorns and sharp, leafless twigs had cut Gastner’s face in half a dozen places as he had crashed down.

  Even as she checked the old man’s neck for a pulse, she realized that she herself was in danger of hyperventilating. She forced herself to breathe evenly, eyes closed, as her fingers traced along the side of his neck. Responding to her touch, one of his hands lifted from the gravel a few inches, and hovered helplessly.

  “Padrino,” Estelle whispered. She flicked the light across his eyes, and saw him grimace and clamp them shut. Slipping her right hand behind his head, she reached across to pull a threatening acacia limb away from his eyes.

  “Don’t try this at home,” Gastner said clearly.

  Estelle couldn’t have laughed if she had wanted to. Holding his head in one hand, she managed to pull her phone from her pocket and dialed 911. Ernie Wheeler answered on the first ring.

  “Ernie, this is Estelle. I need an ambulance at Bill Gastner’s house right now. I don’t know what the problem is. Just get one here.”

  “Ten four,” Wheeler said quickly, and Estelle pocketed the phone, reaching up to cradle Gastner’s head in both of her hands. He murmured something that didn’t make sense. Loath to move him, Estelle simply waited, crouched at his side with his head in her hands. His upper body lay on the ground and his hips and legs lay twisted and awkward on the broad step.

  After a minute, his hand slowly lifted until he could grasp her right forearm. He held onto her with a surprisingly strong grip. In the distance, she heard the ambulance, its siren piercing in the calm, damp air.

  “I don’t know,” Gastner said. “Hell of a thing.”

  His legs appeared to be straight, ankles and knees pointing in all the right directions. His breathing was shallow but regular, and his pulse was steady.

  “A good argument for a porch light, sir,” she said. Her own pulse had slowed enough that her heart felt as if it might not rip loose after all. Gastner raised a single index finger to acknowledge the comment without moving another muscle. She shifted her hands in an effort to cradle his heavy skull and immediately sucked in a sharp breath even as Gastner winced. Her right hand came away wet with blood.

  She could hear the siren marking the ambulance’s route down Grande, heard the vehicle brake hard for Escondido, accelerate again, and then slow for the sharp turn onto Guadalupe. Lights flashed across the cottonwoods, and the ambulance swung wide, then backed up toward Estelle, its own Christmas tree of lights winking.

  Eric Sanchez appeared from the driver’s side, with Matty Finnegan making her way around the right side of the vehicle. While Sanchez opened the rear doors, Matty knelt by Estelle.

  “Did he fall?” she asked as she slipped the stethoscope’s earpieces in place.

  “I think so,” Estelle said. “I found him lying here just a couple of minutes ago.”

  “I didn’t fall,” Gastner said with surprising vehemence.

  “Easy, sir,” Matty said.

  “He has a wound of some kind on the back of his head.”

  “Hit something when he went over, I bet,” Matty said brusquely. “Sir, can you hear me?” She bent close, probing with her fingers while Estelle held her flashlight.

  “Stop shouting,” Gastner said, and Matty laughed, grinning at Estelle. “He hasn’t changed a bit,” she said. “Sir, did you hit your head on something when you fell?” She looked over at Estelle and frowned. “He’s got a nasty laceration on the back of his head. Eric, we’ll want a good pad and easy pressure on that.”

  “I didn’t fall,” Gastner said.

  “That would explain the horizontal position,” Matty quipped. She slipped a blood-pressure cuff around his upper arm, and as she pumped, she turned to her partner, who had clattered the gurney close at hand. “We’re going to want the backboard, Eric. Pulse is 90, BP”-she paused as she held her light to read the dial-“just about 140 over 95.” She patted Gastner’s arm as she pulled off the cuff. “If I didn’t tell ya, you’d ask, right sir? Not too bad, though.”

  Sanchez handed her a neck brace, and she deftly slipped it into place as he worked to secure a temporary bandage around Gastner’s head, tramping down the acacia in the process. “Nice bush,” she said as the last Velcr
o fastener grabbed into place. “Sir, we want to move you out of the vegetation. Are you up for that?”

  Gastner grunted something that might have been a yes.

  “Do you hurt anywhere else? Ankles? Knees? Hips? Back?”

  “Absolutely fit,” Gastner said, and this time he managed to open his eyes. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Matty Finnegan, sir. You know my mom and dad.”

  “Of course I do. I know you, too.”

  “That’s good, sir. We’re going to try and get you on the backboard.” That took considerable muscle and maneuvering, with Estelle holding Gastner’s head and the thick pad of bandage Matty had gauzed in place to cover the head wound.

  Once Gastner was secured to the backboard and gurney, the three of them worked in careful unison to heft his portly carcass into the ambulance.

  “Let’s rock and roll,” Matty said. “See you at the hospital, Sheriff,” she said, and when she saw how pale Estelle’s face was, she added, “He’ll be okay, Estelle.”

  “I’m right behind you,” Estelle said. She could hear Eric Sanchez on the radio, advising Posadas General of an incoming head injury. She watched the ambulance pull out of the driveway and for a moment found herself unable to move. Common sense worked its way into her brain, and she realized that Padrino was now in good hands-there was nothing she could do for him at the hospital.

  Behind her, the house loomed dark and cold. Still wanting to follow the ambulance, she forced herself to turn and walk across the small courtyard. It appeared that Gastner had been stepping up to enter the house, miscalculated, and careened into the acacia head-first. It was the sort of simple trip that a teenager would handle with a corrective skip. Gastner, seventy-one years old, overweight, and always fighting his trifocals, had managed a full gainer.

  The crushed bush showed splotches of blood, but Estelle could see nothing against which he would have torn his scalp, unless he had first struck the sharp edge of the step.

  She checked the front door and found it locked. Off to the left, her light caught the glint of keys, and she stooped to pick them up, recognizing the leather key fob. That made sense. As Gastner had stepped toward the door, he’d been fumbling his keys. When he went flying, so did the keys. She pocketed them and walked quickly back to her car, where she settled into the seat with a loud sigh.